November 17, 2007

Requiem

I attended a Requiem Eucharist yesterday and was seated near a memorial stained-glass window for a young man who was born in 1924 and died in 1942. World War II crossed my mind. There was nothing especially biblical about the window. There were three memorable words across its lower section: Acolyte. Crucifer. Trumpeter.

My first attempt as an acolyte was not until my seminary junior year. It was a ceremonial disaster. My first attempt as a crucifer, I am pleased to say, remains to be sprung on any congregation who may be gathered to witness it. My first trumpet was a very old, soldered cornet that cost twenty bucks. I don’t even want to think of how many music lovers since then may have been puzzled as a result.

Whatever public reference might be made to the occasion of my eventual transition from this life to the next, I would be comforted should someone remember to include that simple, and for me, most pungent word by which that youngster was remembered. Trumpeter.

November 15, 2007

Hardly

Pentecost 25/28C Lk 21.5-19

Dorothy Sayers was one of our brightest scholar-theologians. She said that far too often is Jesus made into a household pet for little old ladies and pale curates. On the other hand and long before we started that kind of Jesus makeover, Gospeler Luke, in on the ground floor and closer to the action, could say in response, Hardly.

In his recounting today, Luke picks up midst the shaking of foundations and the coming of false christer-imposters, and he has Jesus list a whole catalogue of personal damages for his followers ending with, “you will be hated by all for my name’s sake” (Lk 21.19).

Little comfort. I suspect that if the foundations aren’t shaking, we aren’t following. It’s that simple. I’ve not noticed anybody much hating us, just puzzled by our behavior. For the real reason why anybody who truly follows God is persecuted and the foundations are shaken is simply because of who they are and because of this Jesus, whose name they call on. I’ve no idea where the Sunday School book stores ever got that insipid profile pose of the stargazing Jesus that they promote, for there’s little suggestion of that in the gospel. Sayers was right. So long as it’s Jesus, the household-pet, we claim, there’ll never be any foundations shaken, and the church will remain on its duff arguing about sex all the while thinking it’s doing the will of God.

We know the followers of Jesus not only by the way they love one another, but by the way they bear witness that true authority lies beyond this world and that the only real power there is in this world is given from beyond, and the powers of this world cannot bear to hear that their power is limited — and that so are they.

Jesus always warned that his followers should be prepared for many things. And it’s no different today. Be prepared to suffer for your faith; beware those who, when the foundations are shaking, go around talking about “peace in our time” or offer you a warmed-over Jesus (where on earth came the phrase “luke-warm”?). Rather must we be firm in the midst of it all, continue to follow the way, and continue to witness to the world that Jesus alone is the source of power, a power that lies in a Jerusalem far beyond the corrupting powers of this world.

My friend Louie Crew says it something like this, Have great expectations when you challenge those who disagree with you or punish you because of your commitment to Christ. Be steadfast in the truth. Be even more steadfast in loving your enemies. They may turn out to be your friends sooner than you think.

November 14, 2007

Bridge

This morning’s news reports that a team of women representing the US&A at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month is facing sanctions, including a yearlong ban from competition, for a spur-of-the-moment protest. At issue is a homemade sign, written on the back of a menu, that was held up at an awards dinner and read, “We did not vote for Bush.”

According to the report, the president of the U S Bridge Federation claims this is not a free-speech issue, that private organizations can control the speech of people who represent them. One of the players who is also a bridge teacher and a columnist wrote that if the USBF wants to impose conditions of membership that curtail free speech, then it cannot claim to represent our country. The event recalled for some the time when the Dixie Chicks claimed more or less that they didn’t much care to share Texas with the president, then got their records banned and their sales considerably increased.

The US team won the women’s title at the Shanghai event. One of them said the sign was a moment of levity, that they understand that others are questioning and critical of what the US is doing these days, and that they want them to know that they, too, are critical. The French team spoke in support of the Americans and wrote, “you were doing what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.”

CP and I visited England a while back. At the coffee clutch following the Sunday Eucharist at Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon, some Brits, learning we were from “across the pond,” got noticeably distant and curious. They were full of very critical questions about what was it with American politics and international relations. Having been alerted to expect something like this, we had come prepared. Silently, I reached into my pocket, took out and showed them a large Kerry-Edwards campaign button. The ambiance warmed. The conversation shifted to Shakespeare. But not, of course, before someone asked if, being from Tennessee, had we come over to get some culture.

November 13, 2007

Blessing

A Franciscan Blessing

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

November 12, 2007

Standup

I read the other day that Ed Sullivan’s career went all the way from a gossip columnist to an occasionally sought-after emcee to one of the more successful TV hosts ever to come down the airwaves. Together with all that, his show became the occasion for all sorts and conditions of budding-to-rich performers.

Ed Sullivan said that his formula for success was, “Open big, have a good comedy act, put in something for children, and keep the show clean.” When I read that, I realized what good counsel that would be for seminary homiletics students and, as well, for any of us who aspire to occupying pulpits that are already too often six-feet above contradiction. Lets face it, preaching has a lot in common with standup comedy.

We’d do well to look to the comedians, especially for their pace and timing, if not for all Sullivan’s points. The good standups are superb story tellers. And there isn’t a sermon around that couldn’t be improved if it somehow got turned into a story or at least shaped and shortened more like one. If we take Jesus as a model for something more than his sinless life, something we might have a better chance of emulating, and take a hard look at his capacity for telling stories, we’d have a chance of getting it right. I can’t imagine a story told without the kind of momentum that drives the suspense of it, even the mystery and puzzle of it, and literally entices the audience not only to hear, but more importantly to listen.

More than mere speeches, preachments are corporate events. They are part of the eucharistic fabric and should move uninterrupted by the strange habit of opening them with prayers and closing them with amens, unfortunately separating them from the gospel which gets it right and the creed which corrects the mistakes.

Such wishful thinking, I’ve found, never hurts when one sits down to write.

November 9, 2007

Anniversary

It has been said that language is what makes us human. I suppose for some that depends on what is language. It is too often overlooked that words and the languages that envelop them, like flags, or bread, or wine, or a kiss, or a myth, especially a myth, are symbols. To take any of them literally — especially the words — is to destroy their meaning, to risk robbing them of their richest truths and of their creative — or destructive — depths and potential.

Perhaps the same thing is true for anniversaries. I think of those times in our lives that offer occasions for remembering, recreating, representing a bend in our own history and perhaps that of others, no matter how fantastic a fantasy, now. These are those times that had and continue to have special meaning for us, around which our lives have turned ever so slightly or ever so profoundly, but enough so that they remain in one way or another somehow with their recall to affect us.

Strangely among these times are those anniversaries of which we are totally oblivious and remember not at all. Yet around them remains a story, an aura, whose influence intrudes into our consciousness in such a way for us to know that something is afoot, even awry in our psyche, and we know not what. Mayhaps it is an historically distant event with someone close to us whom we hardly remember at all, yet whose time with us represents itself into our memory suddenly, mysteriously, incomprehensibly.

Maybe Jesus had something like this also in mind at his Supper when he asked us to take these symbols and to consume them in thankful remembrance of him. Our members, the ways in which we engage our lives and our relationships, are thus placed in his service in this, another anniversary we remember and celebrate and perhaps even at times shudder, not when we go to church, but when we are church.

November 8, 2007

Reminder

Pentecost 24/27C Lk 20.27-38

“Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to him” (Lk 20.38)

Some thoughts that may (or may not) lend themselves to a homily:

This conversation of Jesus with the Sadducees is an encounter and reminder for our time.

How easily we impose our notions and our experiences framed by this world on what God may have in store for us in a newer age, let alone this one. Perhaps it is truly unavoidable that we do, for we would seem to have no other alternative. Even so, it is best that we not lose sight of how easy it is to risk underestimating the power and authority of God.

Jesus’s encounter insists that we be open to the unexpected gifts of grace. Perhaps the key element in this story is how important it is for our time and our time’s contention over the question of the authority and meaning of tradition. Jesus reminds the Sadducees in their time and us in ours that we must take care lest our understanding of the past — including our reading of scripture and tradition — makes us unable to see new manifestations of God’s will in the present and — more importantly — in the future. That God is constantly making all things new seems so to unnerve us and thus constantly to defy our capacity to embrace it.

As well, the story warns us against limiting the range of God’s grace as though anything or anyone could be beyond it, the so-called unforgiveable sin that God’s Holy Spirit is incapable of forgiving and renewing and reconciling us. If even the dead — and what is more the seeming finality of death — are not beyond that grace, then surely no race or social or economic status or even religion can escape it, but only refuse and reject it.

This refreshing good news of the gospel in Jesus’s hands can and must inform the way we live together as a society of law and order. Our systems of government — and especially of the way we church together — are consistent with that news only when they enhance and enable and inform the gospel’s message of justice and peace, love and freedom. They are altogether contrary to it when they seek to restrict it by imposing our own limited understandings about who we are and the ways we must live together.

November 5, 2007

Games

There come times when the view from the pew of a Sunday morning finds me watching and listening to the Liturgy more than doing it. I should be embarrassed to admit it, but there’re actually a couple of games I play.

One of them is Ring Around the Prayerbook. It’s very simple, but very revealing. It’s a game played by inspecting the edges of the pages in a closed book by looking for the dark line about a quarter inch wide that runs from spine to spine. Open the book at that place, and you’ll quickly find where a congregation’s heart is, that is, whether these are Rite I or Rite II folk. This, of course, at least hints about where these people are in the great ecclesiastical scheme of the changes currently baffling the church. It’s also helpful, say, if one is new in town and shopping for where they might be “at home.”

Then there’re the Prayers of the People. It’s not the ring cycle here, but what happens during the instructed silences. When it comes time to pray for those who are in poor health or otherwise down on their luck or even dead, some congregations mumble a lot and shuffle around some, but others have a prepared list that the leader reads off by name. Sometimes a malady is added if it seems necessary. Ever so often somebody gives God an anatomy lesson just in case.

The prayers the last time I played this game weren’t all that detailed, but they did seem interminable, like maybe the entire parish was on the fritz in one way or another. It occurred to me that the fact that this happened to be Rally Day (aka pledges, please) may have had something to do with the long catalogue.

The real zinger, though, is when the prayers of thanksgiving are solicited, and the silence is hardly broken at all. This is pandemic. Granted, we are celebrating the Holy Eucharist, so the whole liturgical context for the prayers may be said to be one either of or enveloped by an ambiance of thanksgiving. But the contrast between the holier and more well-meaning implorations for some sort of repair for the troops and those offering gratitude for something or other, maybe even a positive result for an earlier request, is almost always astounding. One of the rubrics actually seems to encourage this as it pairs off: “I ask your prayers for ________. (and) I ask your thanksgiving for ________.” As if the prayers are only for fixing something and the thanksgiving is hardly a prayer, but quite another matter altogether.

One can conclude, it seems, that it is safe to imagine that both prayers and thanksgivings, if any, are directed to the same Source with the same fixation that there might be an occasion for appreciation somewhere down the line. Actually, come to think about it, only two of the six more or less standard Prayers of the People options include any opportunity for thanksgiving. So maybe we’re to believe that the liturgical context just speaks for itself and to stop being a bystander and start being a bit more reverent. A spiritual director might give such a direction.

On the other hand, one really cannot ever say thank you too often. I remember a time at a Twelve Step meeting hearing somebody intone, “it ain’t no platitude that an attitude of gratitude is a beatitude of latitude.” I just am not quite freed up enough to point that out while exchanging the Peace.

November 2, 2007

St Isaiah

All Saints Sunday 2007

Somehow, come All Saints Day and its ambiance (we once kept it as an octave, remember?), I feel a sort of twinge for the Old Testament prophets. I wish they got more attention any time, but especially this time of the liturgical year.

I know God-in-Her-heaven easily includes them among the calendar of saints, but somehow, I never hear of the church following suit. There’re lots of St Whosits and St Whatsits and the like, but whoever heard of the Church of St Isaiah?

There’s a kind of imposed holiness we ladle all over the common calendar saints that is somehow always missing from the prophets. I don’t want to be misunderstood, and I know the saints probably make better dinner companions, but I think we should include more prophets in our celebrations, especially during these days. Indeed, the New Covenant says we’re all saints. I’d just like to hear us show a bit more appreciation for the prophets.

It’s not fair to the saints, of course, that we tend to stereotype them like Dorothy Sayers said we stereotype Jesus as household pets for little old ladies and pale curates. For my money, the saints are all spiritual major hitters in their own way, some, borderline if not downright pungently prophetic. But it’s those brass plate prophets that jerked Old Testament satraps around that I miss. Where are they when we need them most?

There’s plenty of work for them to do. Take civil disobedience, for example. Methodist theologian Walter Wink suggests that present-day civil disobedience when true to its form is a modern form of exorcising daemons. And he has a special name for them. Instead of St Paul’s “principalities and powers” and the “mighty” the Virgin Mary would have cast from their thrones, he calls them “domination systems.”

You’ll recognize the type. The war-makers. We know them as the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us against. The desert-makers, those whose greed disregards our stewardship for the earth. The hunger-makers who disdain the poor and in doing so forget that it is God’s grace not our merit that redeems us. And of course, the sexists who put down women at every turn. All these, according to Wink, are functioning and devastating systems of domination that literally force us to cry out.

Jesus took that famous text from Isaiah when he preached about these systems: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,” he said, “because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn… ” (Is 61.1f). Our new Presiding Bishop frequently reminds us how these words define and shape the church’s ministry for these times.

Maybe we don’t recall such indictments so readily when we celebrate the season of All Saints. There’s a sweetness-and-light avoidance of risk-taking when we conjure up the saints and rarely give a thought to corporate welfare or the devastating military-industrial budgets or the over 40 million of us who have no health insurance. Maybe we might. Maybe we churchers could reach deeper into our tradition and call up the prophets, indeed, call out the prophets of our time not to predict our future, but to indict our present, and what-is-more to join with our Lord in his first sermon from Isaiah. Then we could truly include and celebrate ALL the saints.